Now that I have decided on which tires to purchase (Dunlop Direzza Star Spec) I can move on and start building some better brakes. I am using some Wilwood Superlite Calipers with four 44.5 mm pistons. The bracket is being made out of the 3/8in aluminum 6061 plate in the image. Cell phone there for size reference. I will post more as I make progress. By my calculations this should give me about 8% more braking force than the STi brembos. I am building a set for the rear as well to bring bias back in balance.

aluminum tends to go liquid at 1200F and wile your calipers shouldnt be that hot they can get to temperatures that would make that plate more than make it flexible or worse have the caliper brake off through the stress. I'd recommend going back and doing this in steel for your safety.

the rear brake conversion brackets i helped ken from wrx brakes make to use brembos on wrx hubs are aluminum. the brembos mount using aluminum mounting points. and majority of the brakes out now use an aluminum bridge. it would hold up fine.

_________________Cobb ProTuner, and OpenSource Tuning Available Pm me for Details.

I understand your concerns and we have taken all of that into account. One of the guys that works with me is a Mechanical Engineer with expertise in thermodynamics and heat transfer and he has evaluated all the metals we will be using along with how much they should heat up.

With this setup we are looking at maximum temperatures of around 1050F in extreme conditions, while as you stated aluminum will deform at 1200F and even when the caliper heats to 1200F all of that heat will not be transferred to the bracket.

As Robbie has stated, alumnum brackets are the standard for Big Brake kits due to their weight and cost and have proven to be worthy. Also most of the current 2-piece rotors on the market use aluminum hats as well.

Even the $10k Brembo GRT kit for Subarus uses aluminum brackets.

As far as any other myths or questions that may be passed around the forums I will address those as well:

The LBK kits that some vendors sell use the Dynapro caliper which is a lighter caliper that is rated for cars up 2000 lbs and this model of Superlites is rated for cars up to 4500 lbs. The Dynapro's will easily flex on anything more than a small kart race car. These will have some flex to them since they are not monoblock but not more than any other 2 piece caliper

In regards to not having dust boots, I understand that they will wear quicker and from what I understand they will need to be rebuilt every 30-40k miles compared to a caliper with dust boots that can go up to 80k or 100k but the rebuild kits are only $12 per caliper so thats not an issue

As far as noise, I was told that they will be a litte more noisy than a stock passenger car caliper but nothing aggravating and the rest of my car is noisy anyways so I don't mind

Also the entire caliper is forged in aluminum and is rated for Heavy Duty use on Street Performance and Track cars as well as rated for Medium duty for Rally, Road Racing, and NASCAR

Since it is forged it will flex much less than other billet calipers. Below is what I recieved directly from Wilwood:

" The most noteworthy feature of this new caliper design is the forging. Each body is stress-flow forged from premium grade aluminum alloy billets. Stress-flow forging re-aligns the metal's internal grain structure to flow within the contour of the caliper body. This process eliminates the stresses and interruptions to the internal grain structure that occur when machining a straight block billet. Simply stated, there is no better way to build a stronger aluminum caliper body."

The caliper also uses quality stainless steel pistons which due to their design will retard heat transfer to the caliper body.

Some people are also curious as to why Wilwood does not provide dust boots on most of their calipers. The reason is pretty simple. Wilwood calipers are designed with ultimate performance in mind, i.e.: they expect their calipers to be used hard, which means high temperatures. Dust boots turn to a gooey mess or turn hard and brittle when exposed to the temperatures of driving events/track events and in either case, loose any of their effectiveness to keep road grime off the pistons. When you stop and think about it, this could actually cause a dangerous situation. If you run dust boot equipped calipers very hard (to the point of corrupting the dust boots ability to keep grime off the pistons) and then push the pistons back into the caliper without cleaning them, you could unknowingly compromise the piston/caliper seal and possibly cause a brake fluid leak or total failure

I have a whole notebook of research we have done as well as bunch of calculations so feel free to throw any questions out there.

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